Bachinger, Katrina

1995 0-7734-1272-7This is the first systematic analysis of the seventeen tales of Poe's The Tales of the Folio Club. Before he wrote them, Poe had already established a reputation as a poet, and Lord Byron had influenced him more than any other writer. This close reading demonstrates how the Tales appear to be biographies of Byron in disguises, or even in a sense Byronic autobiographies, because their narrators and heroes often exhibit Byron's idiosyncratic mannerisms. The Tales prove to be seamless continuations of Poe's poetry, and major intertexts of Byron's life and works.

1995 0-7734-1270-0The life and works of Sir Philip Sidney, the highly innovative Elizabethan author and statesman, become remarkably relevant to us today when they are viewed, as they are in this book, as explorations of the pleomorphism of gender. Sidney's revealing correspondence with his tutor Hubert Languet displays a friendship that seems to have developed into a homoerotic attachment or Greek love and thereby problematized Sidney's own gender. That personal gender problematic explains, as this book demonstrates, why Sidney's early masque The Lady of May can be read simultaneously as a textualisation of the instability of gender difference and of Sidney's relationship to his Virgin Queen, Elizabeth I. After tracing the same themes through Sidney's Old Arcadia, it focuses on his sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella. There it returns to his problematic homoerotic attachment to Languet, finding in it a new answer to the age-old riddle of those famous love poems.

1987 0-7734-0552-6Contends that Poe's use of Byron as antagonist was an example of the fragmentation of character -- using reflections of Byron as seen by himself, by Poe, by his adulators and defamers -- for literary effect. Besides "William Wilson," also discusses "The Fall of the House of Usher," "Metzengerstein," and others.